HCI in Work and Learning, Life and Leisure

Especially in ill-defined problem spaces, more than one exploration way leads to a solution. But often visual analytics methods do not support the variety of problem solving strategies users might apply. Our study illustrates how knowledge on users’ problem solving strategies can be used in the participatory design process to make a visual analytics method more flexible for different user strategies. In order to provide the users a method which functions as a real scaffold it should allow them to choose their own problem solving strategy. Therefore, an important aim for evaluation should be to test the method’s flexibility.

A crucial aspect for the success of systems that provide decision or negotiation support is a good model of their user’s preferences. Psychology research has shown that people often do not have well-defined preferences. Instead they construct them during the elicitation process. This implies that the interaction between the system and a user can greatly influence the quality of the preference information and the user’s acceptance of the results provided by the system. In this paper we describe a user-centered approach to design preference elicitation interfaces. First, we extracted a number of criteria for successful design of preferences elicitation interfaces from literature and current systems designs. Second we constructed four new intermediate designs that are compositional with respect to different criteria and, furthermore correspond to different thinking styles of the user. Last, we offer first insights from an initial formative evaluation of our designs.

As wireless technologies evolve, mobile technologies and services will increasingly affect our lives, accompanied by positive and negative effects. This development requires a high acceptance of users to the presence of mobile services in various usage contexts. In an exploratory focus-group-interview approach (n = 63), this research investigates usage motives as well as barriers, which are perceived by users of wireless mobile technologies. In order to understand the impact of specific usage contexts, in which mobile services are applied, an ICT context was contrasted to a medical service context. Outcomes show that acceptance factors are neither static nor independent from the specific usage or service context in which a technology is applied. Rather, acceptance reveals to be a product of individual usage motivations, situation-specific evaluations, and individual user profiles.

We investigate people’s attitudes towards the possible use of mobile negotiation support systems (

nss

) in different social contexts and the consequences for their design. For that purpose we developed an online survey based on existing models of technology acceptance. In the questionnaire we showed five filmed scenarios of

nss

use contexts. The data collected from 120 respondents, showed (a) that subjective norm is an important factor influencing the intention to use the system and (b) that the acceptance of

nss

depends on the use context. Therefore, we argue that

nss

should be designed not merely as tools being used in the actual negotiation but as social devices harnessing social networks to provide support in all negotiation phases.

The poor general state of health of the Austrian youth – which is possibly representative for the western industrial world – will have dramatic effects on our health care system in years to come. Health risks among adolescents, including smoking, alcohol, obesity, lack of physical activity and an unhealthy diet, will lead to an increase in chronic diseases. A preventive measure against such a development could be to reinforce health awareness through the use of web and mobile applications supporting self observation and behavior change. In this paper, we present an overview of the latest developments in the area of mobile wellness and take a look at the features of applications that constitutes the current state of the art, as well as their shortcomings and ways of overcoming these. Finally, we discuss the possibilities offered by new technological developments in the area of mobile devices and by incorporating the characteristics that make up the Web 2.0.

The current research aimed to study user diversity with a focus on gender differences in adoption of medical assistive technologies in general, and in particular. In order to understand the gender impact, we conducted two consecutive studies and considered gender as a key moderator of acceptance aspects in the medical context. The first study focused on general aspects of medical technology acceptability: users’ willingness to use it, the importance of privacy and trust as well as the general attitude across gender and specified age groups. For a deeper insight into this topic the second study was conducted in order to analyze gendered acceptance on specific health-related device. As results showed people’s general attitude towards medical technology and their willingness to use such medical assisting devices is throughout positive. However, gender differences emerge at the time when it comes to an assessment of a concrete medical tool (here smart textiles).

The philosophy of discount usability engineering perfectly fits the health care setting, where cost-cutting is ubiquitously present. We adapted Nielsen’s discount usability approach for the health care setting by combining traditional thinking aloud (n=18) and Card Sorting (n=18) with online prototyping (n=5) and simplified thinking aloud (n=5). We used the approach to design an efficient and effective website with infection control guidelines for nursing home staff leading to high levels of satisfaction within a time frame of three months for the total cost of €7195. Based on our experiences, we would advocate using this discount user-centered approach for the design of e-health applications. Future research should concentrate on integrating the principles of creative co-design methods and online research into the discount usability approach.

Healthcare technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive, moving from controlled clinical and laboratory settings, to real environments such as homes, acute care environments and residential care centres. As a consequence, new challenges arise in evaluating the impact of healthcare technologies and interactions in their context of use. In this paper we propose the use of a pattern language as a means of capturing experiences from researchers in the field of evaluating healthcare technologies. The potential benefits of such an approach include the availability of a centralised repository, or collaborative tool of past experiences which can contribute to the reuse of knowledge, which can encourage and improve communication between interdisciplinary members of the healthcare community and which is presented in a ‘lay’ language, understandable by all. We propose to structure the content of our pattern language along three stages of healthcare, namely home care, residential care and acute care and to organise evaluations across each of these stages in terms of physical, social, intellectual and purpose fitness.

In this empirical study we examine the willingness of travelers to use small screen devices providing electronic travel (“e-travel”) services. As in the near future increasingly more and older adults are travelling around, it is a basic question how we can support this wish for mobility. However, electronic travel services on mobile device are only accepted if it is understood in how far these devices meet the actual travel behavior on the one hand and user requirements respecting the usability of devices on the other. Yet, only little knowledge is prevalent regarding the individual reasons for the choice of means of transportation as well as the perceived needs when being supported by a device providing travel services. In order to get a broad insight into age-related mobility patterns, users of a wide age range (N = 151; 18-75 years of age) were questioned in a survey, in which the travel experience (frequency of using different means of transportation and their evaluation) as well as technical experience (Internet usage and handling of small screen devices) were explored. The findings show that age (but not gender) is a crucial factor regarding the acceptance of electronic travel assistants, and services. The crucial factor underlying age effects is the technical experience and travel expertise: The higher the familiarity with electronic services in general (Internet usage) and specifically (handling of mobile devices) and domain knowledge (travel experience), the higher is the perceived usefulness of future e-travel services. Outcomes might be helpful for the development of e-travel applications especially with for the intention to keep the elderly mobile and fit for travelling.

Games such as the Nintendo Wii

TM

are being promoted for use by all ages but there is little experience with how groups of older people integrate Wii playing into their physical and social spaces. This paper focuses on Wii

TM

game play by older people in Sheltered Housing schemes, as part of an initiative to promote physical and social activity in these settings. Using participant observations, interviews and video analysis of sessions over a year we show

how

older people actively construct the sense of a meeting place as part of their Wii game play and the social processes that underlie this. Through the use of bounded regions and a sense of decorum older players create a ‘sacred space’ around the Wii where they can learn new technical literacies, make new social connections with peers and take ownership of the communal spaces in which they live. We conclude with guidelines for encouraging appropriation and empowerment for older people through game play in communal housing settings.

This paper discusses the design process of a system aiming to support daily life of older people in a retirement home. This system called Sammy was designed on a participatory basis by a multidisciplinary team. The main results are the importance of communicating with all the stakeholders regarding both strengths and weaknesses of the new system, the importance of the social factors in system acceptance, the need to combine various evaluation methods during the design process, the importance of contextual factors and the need to take into account the dynamics of population in a retirement home.

User centered design (UCD) is a key success argument for modern software development. In this paper we present a case study on developing a way finding application for mobile devices. The target users are people with special needs such as visually impaired and blind people. It can be shown that user centered design is especially important for “not mainstream” user groups and the resulting products have high acceptance rates. This specialized development methodology combined with customization leads to subjective satisfaction.

Development of information and communication technology has offered new horizons to the deaf and hard of hearing for their integration into working, social and economic environment. Despite the positive attitude of international guidelines, the lack of accessibility of e-learning material is still noticeable for these users. The process of adapting the e-learning materials for deaf and hard of hearing required different approach and guidelines to properly displaying sign language video. Paper presents basic e-learning accessibility guidelines for deaf and hard of hearing and basic directions for suitable design of e-learning sites accessibility. E-learning course (European Computer Driving License Course – ECDL) for deaf, automated video recording system and the transparent presentation of a sign language interpreter within the e-learning material are used as examples of good practice. Evaluations of these examples show high degree of satisfaction, ease of use and comprehension.

The capability to efficiently input texts with hardware or soft keyboards is a major achievement to improve the digital inclusion of motor-impaired users in the modern ICT world. One way to obtain this capability is the use of multi-character keyboards that make it possible to significantly reduce the number of selected keystrokes. To this aim, in this paper we propose the orthogonal pseudo-syllabic layout for an English keyboard with high keystroke savings. Since English is characterised by a large number of frequent monosyllabic words, the careful design of the consonant and vowel graphemes that compose the pseudo-syllables makes it possible to directly select the most frequent multi-character units of the language. Therefore, the frequency statistics of English have been carefully analysed to select a suitable set of pseudo-syllables and to choose their placement on the orthogonal layout. The keyboard layout has then been tested with the automatic acquisition of a set of English texts. The obtained keystroke savings are comparable with those obtained with other languages which, in contrast with English, are characterised by very regular orthographies.

In this article we present a new approach to teaching computer science - the evaluation and visual modeling of algorithms based on metaphorical forms - applied within the core of a virtual education system, the development module for computer-based lessons (LDS). We reveal the structure and characteristics of the teaching process that we implemented in the proposed system, students and their roles, applied teaching methods, solutions for evaluation and a case study on a lesson model. We presented the state of the art in this domain highlighting the advantages of the described solution set, and also possible extensions.

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining in popularity and its added value for learning is being recognized. However, its richness in representation and manipulation possibilities may also become one of its weaknesses, as some learners may be overwhelmed and be easily lost in a virtual environment. Others may spend all their time on exploring features not relevant for their learning tasks. Therefore, being able to dynamically adapt the virtual environment to the personal preferences, prior knowledge, skills and competences, learning goals and the personal or social context in which the learning takes place becomes important. In this paper, we discuss possible adaptations and adaptation strategies for virtual learning environments. We also report on a prototype implementation of an adaptive Web-based virtual learning environment and the lessons learned from this.

This paper presents a case study on the design of mobile applications for on-line learning, based on the needs of its potential users. From the User-Centered Design (UCD) perspective and based on a qualitative approach, in-depth interviews have been held with students who carry out learning-related tasks in a commuting context, together with ethnographic observations of this context. The objective of this research was to understand the needs and requirements of students who learn on-line and who take advantage of their travel time to study or to carry out study-related tasks. Through the content analysis of the data gathered, the tasks carried out by students in a mobile context are contemplated, detecting their inconveniences and needs. From this analysis m-learning application scenarios have been built based on the potential users’ requirements.

The visual complexity of an interface is a crucial factor for usability, since it influences the cognitive load and forms expectations about the subjacent software or system. In this paper we propose a novel method that uses entropy, structure and functions, to calculate the visual complexity of a website. Our method is evaluated against a well known approach of using the file size of color jpeg images for determining visual complexity. Both methods were applied on a dataset consisting of images of 30 different websites. These websites were also evaluated with a web survey. We found a strong correlation for both methods on subjective ratings of visual complexity and structure. This suggests both methods to be reliable for determination of visual complexity.

At work and at leisure people perform various visual search tasks, e.g. they search for a particular icon in software tools, on Web sites or on mobile phones. With an increasing number of items, visual search becomes difficult. Recently, it has been suggested that the so-called contextual cueing effect, which is known from psychological experiments, can be applied to improve visual search performance. Contextual cueing leads to decreased search times for target objects within familiar context configurations. It is assumed that associations between context configurations and target locations are learned implicitly and then used to guide the allocation of attention to the relevant object. In accordance with demands for interface consistency, this mechanism could be interesting for the development of user interfaces. The present study investigated which object features (e.g. color or orientation) can establish the learning process. The results show that implicit learning of color and orientation arrangements are possible, but the transfer to configuration with changed features depends on the recent learning history. Implications of these results are discussed with respect to the design of user interfaces.

The ability to move is an important characteristic of the human condition and an important aspect for interactive settings. The role of body movement however was not addressed with priority in human computer interaction until now. In this paper we explore the possibilities and issues for usability and user experience research utilizing body motion data. We provide an overview of relevant related work and report the setup and initial results of two studies utilizing body motion capture. We discuss the experiences made in using motion capture approaches for human computer interaction research and provide an outlook on future directions of research.

Nowadays most educational institutions use learning systems in order to provide blended or fully online courses in a formal setting with high similarity to learning in a classroom. However, new technologies such as mobile, pervasive and ubiquitous technologies can enable learners to have richer learning experiences through learning that can take place whenever learners are interested in learning, at anytime and anywhere. Multimodal, smart and intelligent devices make the interaction between the learners and the system more natural and intuitive and considering the learners’ current situation and characteristics allows the personalization and adaptation of learning material and activities, leading to more effective learning by providing learners with information that is relevant for them. This workshop brings together researchers from Psychology and Computer Science, aiming at discussing research on using and incorporating such new technologies in learning systems and therefore, providing learners with rich learning experiences at anytime and anywhere, in a more intuitive and personalized way.

The current paper presents a case study conducted to evaluate the robot rabbit Nabaztag functioning as a vocabulary trainer for beginners of English. Hedonic aspects and motivating function, as well as the general usability and overall impression evoked by rabbit, were tested. A group of 18 5

th

grade students of an English class at a German junior high school were instructed to practice 20 pairs of vocabulary. Ten students were assisted by the speaking robot rabbit, while eight learned by applying an ordinary paper-and-pencil method. Results show that after one week, students who had learned with the Nabaztag had, on average, a higher recall than the control group. Moreover, the evaluation of the hedonic and pragmatic quality of interacting with the rabbit was high, as was the evaluation of both ease of use and perceived usefulness. Students learning with the rabbit were in a better mood afterwards than those who learned by means of the traditional method.

The use of blogs as Personal Learning Environment is an emerging trend in higher education. While many teaching and learning tasks are easy to implement in a blog-based PLE, this type of tools still lacks some of the important features that made traditional Learning Management Systems efficient for both teachers and learners.

This paper addresses the challenges of enhancing blog-based learning environments with two new functionalities: learning workflow management and semantic data exchange.

In the first part of the paper we discuss why the characteristics of the "organic" era of interaction, we are living, make us claim the centrality of the "Design" as an element of possible innovation for the whole educational scene of this new century and more so for educational processes that have strong relationships with design domains and practices (HCI, IxD, Design for experience, TEL, etc.). The dissemination and the acquisition of the "design literacy" require, however, the adoption of complex educational processes, like the "organic process", that, in turn, requires the development of an equally complex monitoring system, able to assist teachers/tutors in the evaluation of qualities of the educational Experience and individual Experience styles, to customize, contextualize and, more in general, improve the experiences. In the second part of the paper, thus, we present, as a first step toward the realization of such monitoring system, the development of tools and methodologies that allow to monitor in quasi-real time the social level of the interaction and the quality of the social emotions, i.e. individuals’ emotional feelings and emotional nuances of their relationships.

Mobile Learning (M-Learning) may offer many advantages when designing educational processes as it can help to overcome restrictions of time and place. However, it is necessary to consider the special features of the type of devices used to follow these type of courses in order to guarantee the usability of the learning objects produced for this eLearning modality. In this document we describe the process of designing a set of courses which aim to support learners when developing English grammar, reading and listening skills, explaining the guidelines we have followed to ensure the usability of the final product.

A system able to adapt to different user characteristics may increase user’s learning outcome and advance her/his personal learning experience. This paper reports on research identifying and appraising user personal differences employed in user modelling for adaptive educational systems. A preliminary set of individual characteristics relevant for adaptation is proposed, along with a framework for their categorization. The framework is derived on the basis of empirical studies and survey papers reviewing the usage of these variables in adaptive and adaptable systems. Each variable is addressed from the perspective of its definition, implementation in existing systems and relevance for adaptation. Methods for variable detection and quantification are discussed as well. Suggested framework represents authors’ perspective of the state-of-the-art in analyzing user individual differences and adds to the body of knowledge related to the user analysis as an essential part of an adaptive system development process.

Scene segmentation is a crucial task in the structural analysis of film. State-of-the-art scene segmentation algorithms usually target fiction films (e.g. Hollywood films). Documentaries (especially artistic archive documentaries) follow different montage rules than fiction films and consequently require specialized approaches for scene segmentation. We propose a scene segmentation algorithm targeted at artistic archive documentaries. We evaluate the performance of our technique with archive documentaries and contemporary movies and obtain satisfactory results in both domains.

Emerging computational multimedia tools and techniques promise powerful ways to organise, search and browse our ever-increasing multimedia contents by automating annotation and indexing, augmenting meta-data, understanding media contents, linking related pieces of information amongst them, and providing intriguing visualisation and exploration front-ends. Identifying real-world scenarios and designing interactive applications that leverage these developing multimedia technology is certainly an important research topic in itself but poses a number of challenges: the currently practiced methodologies and tools in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design seem to work better when the target users and usage requirements have been clearly identified and understood in advance whereas much of what emerging multimedia technology could offer is expected to create completely new user activities and usage that we are not aware of; immature multimedia tools currently being researched are not good enough to be the core engines of real-world applications today, making realistic user studies through deployment difficult; our future interaction platforms will be more than just desktop PC, Web, or mobile devices but many other forms of tangible, embedded, physical appliances which we expect the currently developing multimedia technology would be coupled with. In this paper, these challenges and the insights into how we could get over them are explored based on the author’s decade-long experience in designing novel interactive applications for multimedia technology.

The growing amount of digital music content and the increasing connectivity of vehicles raise new challenges in terms of media access for vehicle drivers. Creating easily a personalized playlist in vehicles involves a unified representation of various metadata, combined with a mobile architecture addressing media resolution and aggregation issues. This paper analyzes the technical aspects of mobile access to music metadata and its use in a personalized playlist generation scenario. A prototype illustrates this study and gives first results.

We introduce an easy-to-use video browsing tool which assists users in getting a quick overview of videos as well as in finding segments of interest. It provides a parallel and a tree-based view for browsing the content of videos – or even video collections – in a hierarchical, non-sequential manner. The tool has a plug-in architecture and can be extended both by further presentation methods and by video analysis algorithms.

Akamai offers the largest Content Delivery Network (CDN) service in the world. Building upon its CDN, it recently started to offer High Definition (HD) video distribution using HTTP-based adaptive video streaming. In this paper we experimentally investigate the performance of this new Akamai service aiming at measuring how fast the video quality tracks the Internet available bandwidth and to what extent the service is able to ensure continuous video distribution in the presence of abrupt changes of available bandwidth. Moreover, we provide details on the client-server protocol employed by Akamai to implement the quality adaptation algorithm. Main results are: 1) any video is encoded at five different bit rates and each level is stored at the server; 2) the video client computes the available bandwidth and sends a feedback signal to the server that selects the video at the bitrate that matches the available bandwidth; 3) the video bitrate matches the available bandwidth in roughly 150 seconds; 4) a feedback control law is employed to ensure that the player buffer length tracks a desired buffer length; 5) when an abrupt variation of the available bandwidth occurs, the suitable video level is selected after roughly 14 seconds and the video reproduction is affected by short interruptions.

Resolution of digital images is on the rise, but screens of mobile devices are still small. Therefore, image adaptation and especially image re-targeting for browsing images is still a challenging research topic. In this short paper we report work in progress on a social interactive game that can be used to identify meaningful portions of images. Based on preliminary evaluation we propose that these areas, found by our game, should be retained in an image re-targeting process.

The paper presents an empirical study with a digital educational game (DEG) called 80Days that aims at teaching geographical content. The goal of the study is twofold: (i) investigating the potential of the eye-tracking approach for evaluating DEG; (ii) studying the issue of vicarious learning in the context of DEG. Twenty-four university students were asked to view the videos of playing two micro-missions of 80Days, which varied with regard to the position of the non-player character (NPC) window (i.e. lower right vs. upper left) and the delivery of cognitive hints (i.e. with vs. without) in this text window. Eye movements of the participants were recorded with an eye-tracker. Learning effect and user experience were measured by questionnaires and interviews. Significant differences between the pre- and post-learning assessment tests suggest that observers can benefit from passive viewing of the recorded gameplay. However, the hypotheses that the game versions with cognitive hints and with the NPC window on the upper left corner can induce stronger visual attention and thus better learning effect are refuted.

In this tutorial, we will present the Human Interface Guidelines for both iPhone and iPad and offer hands-on experience in designing user interfaces for these devices. We will also discuss how to integrate the guidelines in higher education and give examples from our lecture on iPhone application development. The goal of the tutorial is to provide the participants with a basic understanding of the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines and enable them to review and design iPhone apps according to the standards.

This paper addresses a paradigm shift in the way the web is being searched. This shift is occurring due to the increasing percentage of search requests being made from mobile devices, changing the way users search the web. This change is occurring for two reasons: first, users of smart phones are no longer searching the web relying on generic, horizontal search engines as they do on the desktop, and second, smart phones are far more aware of the user’s context than desktop machines. Smart phones typically include multiple sensors that can describe the user’s current context in a very accurate way, something the standard desktop machine cannot normally do. This shift will mean changes for the information retrieval community, the developers of applications, the developers of online services, usability engineers, and the developers of search engines themselves.

Knowledge is considered a foundation of all aspects of society and economy in general, and the need for fast, relevant and just-in-time learning is more important than ever. However, current educational systems face difficult challenges when it comes to interoperability, reusability, adaptivity, as well as knowledge sharing and management. This paper presents a novel approach to the development of educational systems based on the integration of Semantic Web technologies and the agent technology through an open e-learning architecture named SWEA. SWEA is to provide a distributed, dynamic and adaptive learning environment.

Personal Learning Environments have emerged as a complementary, even challenging, paradigm to Adaptive Learning Systems. We consider the mash-up era as an appropriate approach for a successful realization of digital personal learning environments. However, mash-ups are also accompanied by critical technical and usability challenges. In this paper, we try to identify some of these challenges and present our solution approach which results in Semantic Mash-up Personal and Pervasive Learning Environments (SMupple).

In order to create high quality and easy-to-use mobile software, the process of mobile device applications (MDAs) development must be accommodated to usability challenges. As present-day MDAs mostly target smartphones, with touchscreen ones increasingly gaining popularity, the primary focus in improving this process should include support for usability awareness at the earliest possible development phase for this class of mobile devices. In this paper we propose a model interaction benchmark test providing both quantitative and qualitative usability feedback at the elementary touchscreen action level.

This paper examines problems and solutions related to the integration of the HCI perspective in software engineering and production. The goal is to bridge the gap between software engineers and HCI professionals by improving mutual understanding of their respective fields of interest. An information system is a complex system that can be modelled by means of the multilevel theory. The user interface design is a design problem without a single proper solution. There is no standard user interface look and feel, so that a multilevel user interface model is proposed. The user interface design is approached through hierarchical levels making it possible to choose between multiple developments methodologies. Case study: A highway automatic toll collection system user interface design proves that the multilevel approach can bridge the gap between developers and designers making team members use their respective strong points.

In this research we examine the influence of technical expertise on future medical technology. Technical expertise is assumed to positively influence the acceptance of modern technologies, and there is evidence within the information and communication technology (ICT) sector for this. While no one would seriously dispute this basic impact of technical expertise on technology acceptance, it is far from clear what the main drivers of technical expertise are. In order to understand the complex nature of expertise on the one hand and its impact on the acceptance of other technology domains on the other, an empirical approach was undertaken. 100 participants (19-75 years) participated in a survey, in which the acceptance of a medical mobile device was explored. Outcomes show (1) that technical expertise is a highly complex construct entailing different facets (knowledge, motivational, emotional and pragmatic components), which are influenced by age and gender of respondents (2) technical expertise in the ICT domain decisively modulates acceptance of medical technology. Interestingly, a low technical expertise does not only reduce the acceptance of the pro-using arguments, but is specifically related to a high confirmation of contrausing arguments.